Pitt #267038

With such parents, the younger Pitt was born a politician; his rare qualities of mind were from his earliest childhood directed and trained for parliamentary work. It did not, indeed, at first appear probable that he would survive to realise the designs of his father, who himself had suffered from the gout before leaving Eton. A feeble constitution hardly-promised life, much less vigour; but, fortified by floods of port Wine — the prescrip tion of Lord Chatham's favourite physician, Dr. Addington, the father of the Prime Minister — it enabled him to live to be forty-seven, and sustain for near twenty years, almost unaided, the government of the country. From six to fourteen, however, his health was so indifferent that for more than half that period he was unable to apply himself to study; and, when at the latter age he went as an undergraduate to Cambridge, it stands recorded that he was accompanied by a nurse. In the autumn of that year (1773) his disorder reached its crisis; he returned home dangerously ill; but, on his recovery, he seems to have secured a share of health sufficient for the purposes of public life, and troubled only by periodic fits of the gout, then the appanage of statesmanship, which he owed less to his original disease than its original remedy.